Xara Xtreme - a Test Drive

Xara Xtreme is a graphics drawing application which has been available on the Linux desktop for about a year now. But I just now got around to trying it. For the obvious reason, and I'm sure many of you familiar with graphics on Linux would concur, that I didn't think yet another vector graphics editor was anything to jump out of my chair for. "Ho hum", I sighed, "we have Inkscape, Sodipodi, Karbon14, OpenOffice Draw, Scribus, and Skencil, to name a few. What can they possibly show me with a vector path that I haven't seen already?"

Well, I wish those words were now printed on chocolate, because I'm eating them. Xara Xtreme is mind-blowingly good. Not to say that it's perfect - I have a few quibbles, but fer Chrissake this is a 0.7 alpha release we're talking here. Let's just deal with the short-comings upfront. At this point: